Online Catalogue last updated 18th of June 2008
"All that the age had just cause for pride in-its advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried and the impossible-came to a head in the Brooklyn Bridge." - Lewis Mumford, 1924
It is one of the best-known bridges in the world ... an inspiration to countless artists, poets and would be engineers ... a souring steel span whose gossamer web of cables and great Gothic arches have made it instantly recognizable to millions. It is the Brooklyn Bridge, of course, arching the East River to link the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan.
In this profusely illustrated account of the building of the bridge, historian Mary Shapiro has selected over 160 rare contemporary photos, prints and engravings that document each stage of construction. From the notebooks of John A. Roebling, the bridge's designer, to the fanfare of opening day, illustrations from public and private archives and 19th-century periodicals (Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated News, Scientific American, etc.) give a wonderful you-are-there flavour to the narrative. You witness each step of the mammoth project: building and sinking the caissons; erection of the great granite towers on each side of the river; spinning and wrapping the cables; laying the roadbed, construction of the giant anchorages, and much more.
Complementing the splendid visual documentation, Mrs. Shapiro's extensive, detailed and well-researched text recounts a saga of human ingenuity and perseverance in the face of immense odds: fatal accidents (including one that took the life of John Roebling before construction had even begun), fire, fraud, corruption and the persistent skepticism of those who claimed the entire structure would collapse in the first strong wind.
In chronicling both the human drama and the dizzying technological feats involved , the author has compiled a stirring archive of words and pictures steeped in the horse-and-buggy ambience of Old New York. Here are the great granite towers looming over the low-slung landscape of the 19th-century New York; Beal's celebrated panorama of Manhattan from atop the Brooklyn tower; a rare photo of Opening Day, May 24, 1883, when thousands vied to be first across.
Code No. 010120, 122 pages, ISBN 0486244032, $22.00